The Pi didn’t know it was taking orders from a piece of fruit. As far as it was concerned, a banana is as good as a keyboard, or a mouse.

Or a pair of scissors, or a slip-n-slide, or a cream pie, or Jell-O, as you can see in Makey Makey’s video.

Milo, Master of the Musa, became the world’s favorite sysadmin when he posted about his creation on Reddit.

That post was beloved. The banana was put on a pedestal. Milo was contacted by journalists from the likes of Ubergizmo, The Register, Geek.com and The Inquirer.

The post was upvoted into the orange zone for two weeks.

Project managers wanted to know how he did it.

The upshot: this all led to…

Wi-Fi Banana 2.0
Milo decided that it was time for his banana setup to grow up. Bossman had already eaten the Banana, even though Milo had sworn it would stay up there forever and for brown-nasty ever.

As it is, Wi-Fi Banana V1 had already morphed into a croissant.

The next step, as he said Tuesday in a follow-up post on Reddit, was for the banana to become a “suit-wearing enterprise slab.”

Instead of pasting a 6 line shell script that wasn’t really meant for production, I got in touch with a developer that made it enterprise ready.

He’s selling it in 5 versions, from a $99 software-only product on up to a Platinum plug-and-play model that includes preinstalled software, a touchscreen, a modem, an Access Point and a firewall with a captive portal for $1,299.

Like the original system, the enterprise version acts as a captive portal and token dispenser for Wi-Fi networks.

To gain access to the network, users press a button on a touchscreen instead of fondling fruit. They receive a unique token granting them guest access to the network.

The token can be displayed on the touchscreen or sent to a user’s mobile phone as an SMS message.

The device can dispense up to 65,000 tokens before needing a token refresh.

And in true maker spirit, Milo’s also offering a free download to anybody who comments on the Reddit post.

One Redditor was understandably dismayed at the prospect of banana deprivation:

Where is the banana? How are the users supposed to get WiFi codes without a banana? I think maybe this needs to go back to the drawing board… 😛

…but Milo assured the commenter that he could still build him or her a first-generation, banana-powered model.

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About the author

Lisa has been writing about technology, careers, science and health since 1995. She rose to the lofty heights of Executive Editor for eWEEK, popped out with the 2008 crash and joined the freelancer economy. Alongside Naked Security Lisa has written for CIO Mag, ComputerWorld, PC Mag, IT Expert Voice, Software Quality Connection, Time, and the US and British editions of HP's Input/Output.

The problem with using a real banana is that all bananas are descended from the same variety, the Cavendish, which means they could all be wiped out by Panama disease. This means that the physical banana is a single point of failure in this system.